Sunday, September 29, 2013

I’m betting that a lot of people will come to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (DaCapo) for an inside glimpse of Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor and stick around for Taylor’s charm, wit and 21st century philosophizing.

We already knew Taylor could write. Back in 2011 he wowed his fans with Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good. Yes, that book was memoir. But it was more, as well. This new book takes that original concept and amps it up. Way up, in fact. Here again, Taylor himself is the lens, but we’re looking way beyond the man and his music now. In fact, we’re looking beyond this very life.

In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven, Taylor takes us on a tour of his personal paranormal: the oddities he’s encountered, some unexplained things that have happened near him and how, in many ways, he’s made peace with the bizarre and unknown. Taylor’s view is beyond religion. As he points out:

Is is now 2013. I am here to tell you that if you still need a guidebook that was written when people were still trying to marry camels, you have bigger issues than how to live your life. The human race has been gifted over the centuries with fantastic minds: philosophers of such extraordinary knack that we have thrived in leaps and bounds with each generation …. But it is almost always the elders of our race who cling to this horseshit like flies at an outhouse, and those same people are almost always in positions of power, using the “good word” to control the minds -- and the votes -- of the flock.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven is an odd book to try and categorize or even talk about. In fact, I’m having a problem thinking about where we might catalog it on January. It could, in a way, be considered Art & Culture as the author’s background certainly warrants it. I toyed with the thought of Biography, but really, the book is so much beyond that. We don’t have a Self-Help section, but if we did, this book wouldn’t really belong there.

Like Taylor himself, the book is different and unique. Not one thing but many. It might uplift you. It might nudge at your worldview. But it will certainly engage you and strike you once again at the odd wit and wisdom of this deeply talented man. ◊